Presently the refuse removal industry is in the midst of a revolution. The industry, which in the past, has been consumed merely with efforts to remove waste and refuse, is becoming increasingly focused on waste and refuse processing in an effort to alleviate the problems associated with landfills and to reduce the environmental impact of waste production through recycling and reuse programs.
Landfills are rapidly filling up as the amount of waste and refuse generated continues to increase. Presently, according to one estimate, the average American produces about 1,600 pounds of waste a year (about 4.4 pounds every day), which works out to approximately 240 million tons of waste a year nationwide. This does not account for industrial or commercial waste, and Americans are not even the world's largest per capita producers of waste. The problems of storing all this waste are acute and endemic.
Reducing the need and reliance on landfills serves a number of purposes. It reduces the likelihood of environmental problems, reduces the demand on space, not to mention the fact that landfills make very unpopular neighbors and consequently new landfills are very difficult to build. Landfills, however, cannot be eliminated. Thus, one of the best and most viable solutions is to reduce the amount of waste and refuse that reaches the landfill.
A number of prior art solutions to this problem have been tried, with some success, but also with substantial drawbacks. In particular, recycling programs have been used to separate certain materials from the waste stream that use to be routinely deposited in landfills. Most commonly, recycling programs can reclaim many types of plastics, glass, and paper products. Furthermore, in many locations programs have been established to remove environmentally sensitive products from the general waste stream, such as paints and solvents, automotive wastes (used motor oil, antifreeze, etc.), pesticides (insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, etc.), mercury-containing wastes (thermometers, switches, fluorescent lighting, etc.), electronics (computers, televisions, cell phones), aerosols/propane cylinders, caustics/cleaning agents, refrigerant-containing appliances, some specialty batteries (e.g. lithium, nickel cadmium, or button cell batteries), and ammunition. These items generally can no longer be disposed of through common curbside waste collection and must be taken to specialized disposal sites. Another example of materials that are frequently separated includes compostable material such as yard waste and organics such as food scraps and food-soiled paper products.
The foregoing represents a large percentage of overall waste, and separating these products from the waste stream has certainly produced environmental advantages as well as substantially reduced the amount of material deposited in landfills, however, this result has not been achieved without drawbacks and disadvantages.
In particular, separating the waste streams generally has been accomplished by creating wholly independent collection streams. Hazardous waste is no longer handled through curbside waste removal, and must be taken to a number of different facilities for processing and disposal. Similarly, recyclables must be separated from general waste, placed in different collection bins, collected by a separate fleet of vehicles, and processed independently from general waste.
Recently, the same process has been used for compostable refuse such as yard waste and organics. These items also must be separately collected and processed. In some cases, all compostable materials can be combined for purposes of collection and processing, however, this solution produces inefficiencies. Because organics can contain pathogens, they must be processed to a higher standard than yard waste, which does not include pathogens. Combining yard waste and organics requires the yard waste to receive unnecessary processing.
Of course, the yard waste and organics can be separated at the point of collection, but this requires separate bins, and separate collection vehicles. In some cases, the homeowner would need four separate bins (one for organics, yard waste, recyclables, and general waste). Waste collectors would need four separate vehicles to collect the waste. The inefficiencies in the scheme quickly outweigh any environmental advantages gained from separation.
An additional problem encountered in waste processing is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to track the waste on a granular enough scale to tell if the various processing programs are being used at all, and if so whether they are used efficiently. For example, in most cases collection routes are automated, whereby a collection vehicle mechanically picks up the bins and dumps the refuse without any human intervention. Thus, it is no longer possible to monitor how much waste, and what types of waste, is being processed.
Thus, a need exists for more efficient method of collecting and processing waste, and one that can account for usage.